Dual boot: Vista and XP installed independently

[libastral]

Hello dear friends again

I got notebook with Vista Business pre-installed, and I need dual boot with old good XP Pro (box version).

So I've installed XP on a next partition turned into "active" state for that setup, that's XP did NOT made any changes to the Vista partition during installation routine.

The current hard disk partitions layout is the following now:

1 Primary, Recovery

2 Primary, Vista

3 Primary, XP

4 Extended, 4.1 - private data.

After XP install I've marked the Vista partition as Active again, and recover Vista's bootloader back.

So now I need to let it boot both OSes.

Now, what I have done till now in Vista's cmd:

bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d "WinXP Pro"
bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume3
bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addfirst
bcdedit /timeout 10
bcdedit /default {ntldr}

But unfortunately it DOESN'T load XP, immediately rebooting instead.

Figuring out, I tried to put ntldr and ntdetect.com onto Vista partition's root (that's C: drive), now boot seems to be initialized, BUT the same moment stops complaining there's no hal.dll at "windows root\system32" directory.

BUT I HAVE this file at %systemroot%\system32 in both Windowses!!

So any help would be appreciated guys, I'm about "going slightly mad" with all of that stuff

Anyway thanks for reading so far..

Any ideas?

[Yorkshire PC]

I didn't clearly understanding what you did with your above post, but after installing XP, you have to restore vista's bootloader. You need to use a software called EASYBCD, which you can download from: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

Easybcd allows you easily restore vista's bootloader setup dualbooting with xp without too much headache. Bear in mind you will need Microsoft .Net framework 2.0.

For further guidance, please follow:- http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_a...uide.htm?page=4

hope this helps

Yorkshire PC